AR6015 SUSTAINABLE PLANNING AND ARCHITECTURE

OBJECTIVES:

• To understand the concept of sustainability and sustainable development

• To inform the various issues like climate change, ecological footprint, etc.

• To understand low impact construction practices, life cycle costs and alternative energy
resources.

• To familiarize the students with the various rating systems for building practices with case
studies.

• Through case studies to understand the concept of sustainable communities and the economic
and social dimensions.

UNIT I

Concept of Sustainability – Carrying capacity, sustainable development – Bruntland report –

Ethics and Visions of sustainability.

UNIT II

Eco system and food chain, natural cycles – Ecological foot print – Climate change and
Sustainability

UNIT III

Selection of materials Eco building materials and construction – Biomimicry, Low impact
construction, and recyclable products and embodied energy. Life cycle analysis. Energy sources
– Renewable and non-renewable energy.

UNIT IV

Green building design – Rating system – LEED, GRIHA, BREEAM etc., case studies.

UNIT IV

Urban ecology, social and economic dimensions of sustainability, urban heat Island effects,
sustainable communities – Case studies.

OUTCOMES:

1. The students are oriented about the concepts of ecosystem carrying capacity, ecological
footprint, sustainability and sustainable development.
2. The students are aware of the emerging vulnerabilities of global warming and climate change
and understand the contribution of building industry to the same.

3. The students are familiar with the various approaches to achieving sustainable buildings and
communities

4. The students understand the various incentives and evaluation systems for green buildings

REFERENCES:

1. Dominique Gauzin – Muller “Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism: Concepts, Technologies

and examples”, Birkhauser, 2002.

2. Slessor, Eco-Tech : “Sustainable Architecture and High Technology”, Thames and Hudson
1997.

3. Ken Yeang, “Ecodesign : A manual for Ecological Design”, Wiley Academy, 2006.

REQUIRED READINGS: 1. Arian Mostaedi , “Sustainable Architecture : Low tech houses”,

Carles Broto, 2002. 2. Sandra F.Mendler & Willian Odell, “HOK Guidebook to Sustainable
Design”, John willey and sons, 2000. 3. Richard Hyder, “Environmental brief:Pathways for
green design”, Taylor and Francis, 2007. 4. Brenda Vale and Robert Vale, “Green Architecture:
Design for a sustainable future”, Thames and Hudson 1996.
UNIT – I
The Concept of Sustainability
The name sustainability is derived from the Latin word sustinere (tenere, to hold; sub,
under). The word “Sustainability” has many meanings - "maintain", "support", "endure" and
“withstand”. In tamil it means “தததததததத”, “தததததத ததததததத”. It most commonly means
‘maintaining the world we live in’.

The main idea is that we must act responsibly so that resources on the planet will be able to
support many generations to come. There are only limited number of resources on Earth.
Sustainability means to maintain these resources forever. Our actions have a deep impact on the
environment and we need to protect it for the future generations. In addition to natural
resources, we also need social and economic resources. Sustainability is not just
Environmentalism. Embedded in most definitions of sustainability we also find concerns for
social equity and economic development.
Carrying Capacity
In the context of sustainability, carrying capacity is the size of the population that can be
supported indefinitely upon the available resources and services of supporting natural, social,
human, and built capital. At the global scale, scientific data now indicates that humans are living
beyond the carrying capacity of planet Earth and that this cannot continue indefinitely.

A simple example of carrying capacity is the number of people who could survive in a lifeboat
after a shipwreck. Their survival depends on how much food and water they have, how much
each person eats and drinks each day, and how many days they are afloat. If the lifeboat made
it to an island, how long the people survived would depend upon the food and water supply on
the island and how wisely they used it. A small desert island will support far fewer people than
a large continent with abundant water and good soil for growing crops.

In this example, food and water are the natural capital of the island. Living within the
carrying capacity means using those supplies no faster than they are replenished by the
island's environment: using the 'interest' income of the natural capital. A community that is
living off the interest of its community capital is living within the carrying capacity. A
community that is degrading or destroying the ecosystem on which it depends is using up its
community capital and is living unsustainably.

The term “carrying capacity” can simply be defined as the maximum population that can be
supported or sustained by an ecosystem over time. Carrying capacity can equally mean “the
maximum pressure or load that a system can conveniently withstand before breaking down”. A
system breaks down when it can no longer cope with the pressure from the loads it is carrying.
In like manner, when the carrying capacity of the earth as a system can no longer sustain the
pressure of population explosion, the unacceptable impacts occur in the form of deteriorating or
negative effects. In other words, carrying capacity of an area refers to an extreme limit. This
limit defines the population carrying capacity of the area. If this limit is crossed then the nature
will react by imposing pressure to resist the abrupt growth and development of the people
resulting into equilibrium. These pressures can be in form of floods, droughts, famines,
landslides, etc.

Carrying capacity has been conceptualized differently among various professions. For instance,
in the construction industry, the term is used to refer to the ability of the foundations, materials
or structures to accommodate a given load (load-bearing capacity), in terms of either weight or
volume and number of cars a freeway or a bridge can carry smoothly. In international shipping
activities, it may be defined by the quantity of cargo an ocean-going freighter or steam boat can
carry; and from the perspective of tourism management, carrying capacity denotes the number
of people who can use a given area without an acceptable alteration in the physical environment.
In urban and regional planning, carrying capacity can be seen as a tool for achieving sustainable
development. This is because it determines the level of human activities, population growth,
patterns and extends of land use, physical development that can be sustained by the urban
environment without causing serious degradation and irreversible change
Dimensions and factors affecting the carrying capacity of an area
Carrying capacity of an area is not static; it exhibits a kind of leadlag relationship between man
and the environment. For example, it is possible for a region to take steps to exceed its carrying
capacity temporarily; and a renewable resource base cannot indefinitely sustain a population
beyond its carrying capacity.

The carrying capacity of an area may vary for different species and change over time due to a
variety of factors such as:

1) Population: this relates to the number of plants or animal species occupying a place. If
the number exceeds the space be affected.
2) The natural resources; food availability and water supplies are vital to the survival of any
population. Resources from the environment are needed for sustenance of industries to
enhance quality of life. If the resources are exceeded the carrying capacity may be
affected.
3) The waste they generate and subsequently dispose of by means of natural sewage
systems (soil, sea, atmosphere); if waste generation far exceeds beyond the limit the
environment can cope with or assimilate, the carrying capacity may be altered.
4) The technologies (tools and systems) they apply to exploit the habitat;
5) The species in-built resilience for systematic or sporadic perturbations or threats to the
environment.

However, if the carrying capacity of a population’s species is exceeded, the following

repercussions may occur:

1. The species or the organisms may become locally extinct;

2. The environment may be permanently altered or destroyed;
3. In case of too many animals, overgrazing may occur, loss of vegetation cover, irreversible
changes to soil quality and productivity, which in turn leads to a reduced carrying
capacity for the livestock of the area concerned.

Humans today extract and use around 50% more natural resources than only 30 years ago. For
example, International Energy (2012) equally observed that the world energy-consumption
patterns escalated from 4,672 million tonnes of energy in 1973 to 8,677 million tonnes of energy
in 2010. This increasing resource extraction does not just lead to environmental problems, but it
is often linked to social problems such as human rights violation and poor working conditions.
These negative environmental and social impacts are mostly felt in Africa, Latin America and
Asian countries with low environmental and social standards. Given current growth, world
extraction of natural resources could increase to 100 billion tonnes by 2030. It must be noted
that people in the rich countries consume up to 10 times more natural resources than those in
the poorest countries. On the average, an inhabitant of North America consumes around 90
kilogram (kg) of resources each day. In Europe, the consumption is around 45 kg per day, while
in Africa, people consumes only around 10 kg per day.

One important dimension of carrying capacity as introduced into literature is that carrying
capacity is conceptualized as a payload or maximum load. This signifies that, the tariff system
imposed on cargos carried by ships and steam boats in several centuries back was recorded
based ‘register tonnage’ regardless of how much cargo the ship carried on a particular voyage. In
this perspective, the meaning of carrying capacity refers to the amount X that Y was designed to
carry.

However, the adoption of carrying capacity as the core concept in range management was in
1886 in New Zealand where the meaning of “carrying” changed from the literal to much more
figurative sense. By 1889, carrying capacity had become a measure of rangeland management.
As at 1920s and 1930s, the early wildlife managers have started applying the concept of carrying
capacity to wildlife in hopes of understanding and increasing the number of deer, quail and
other game various places could produce. However, the usage of carrying capacity crept into
population biology and global human population almost at the same time after World War II.
According to, the concept of carrying capacity to humans expanded its scale to continent and
entire globe giving rise to Malthusian sense of carrying capacity that pervades general use of the
term today. This development provided a bench mark against which to evaluate population
dynamics in the field setting.

In the global human population parlance, Odum formulated a carrying capacity with expressed
precision of what could be expected if a population lived without relation to the environment.
Although, this may not happen empirically, knowledge of such norm nonetheless, allowed every
observed deviation from it to appear as an actual shortage of some environmental resource. In
other word, as long as the population grows in relation with the environment, environmental
limitation is bound to occur which formed the basis of Malthus’s arguments about two hundred
years ago. That is, lack of environmental constraints will escalate the population of the earth
exponentially. But, critics of Malthus postulations argued that development in trade and
technology have traditionally pushed back the “limit” to “growth” and will continue to do so
indefinitely. This thinking believed that resource depletion is no consequence and sustainability
is best assured by staying on our growth-oriented course. By contrast, many ecologists and earth
scientists have argued that the explosion of human populations and cultural artifacts made
possible by trade and technology can only be temporary, and the mode of industrialized
production and consumption has proven costly, with social dislocation, economic inequalities
and environmental degradation becoming global problem.

Consequently, arising from the arguments of Vogt and Hardin (who equate the world with a
pasture that can only support a finite number of animals/humans), Ehrlich concluded that “the
key to understanding overpopulation is not population density but the number of people in an
area relative to its resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities.
The question now arises, when is an area overpopulated? The simple answer is, when the
population of the area cannot be maintained without rapidly depleting non renewable resources
(or converting renewable resources to non renewable ones) and without degrading the capacity
of the environment to support its population. In short, if the long-term carrying capacity of an
area is clearly being degraded by its current human occupants, the area is overpopulated”. By
this standard, the entire planet and virtually every nation is already vastly populated (Ehrlich,
1990). To this end, there is a growing evidence to support the view that we are now beginning to
push up against the biophysical limits that our landscape can support. Postel pointed out that
our population size, consumption patterns, and technological choices have made us to surpass
the planet’s carrying capacity. Other indicators which point to the earth’s carrying capacity being
exceeded are: peak oil ; climate change; water shortage ; population pressure, among others.

However, one of the pioneer attempts to estimate the level of environmental degradation by the
dwelling population in the urban area is the mathematical calculations developed by Ehrlick in
the 1970s called IPAT equation (IIT, 2012). I = P ∙ A ∙ T. In this formulation, “I” refers to the
impact on the environment, “P” refers to the size of the human population, “A” refers to the
affluence or the level of consumption by that population and “T” refers to the processes used to
obtain resources and transform them into useful goods and wastes
Overshoot: When a population surpasses its carrying capacity it enters a condition
known as overshoot. Because carrying capacity is defined as the maximum population
that an environment can maintain indefinitely, overshoot must by definition be
temporary. Populations always decline to (or below) the carrying capacity. How long
they stay in overshoot depends on how many stored resources there are to support
their inflated numbers. Resources may be food, but they may also be any resource that
helps maintain their numbers. For humans one of the primary resources is energy,
whether it is tapped as flows (sunlight, wind, biomass) or stocks (coal, oil, gas,
uranium etc.). A species usually enters overshoot when it taps a particularly rich but
exhaustible stock of a resource. Like oil, for instance…
Sustainable development
The most frequently used definition of Sustainable development is from the Brundtland Report
“Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present (people)
without compromising the ability of future generation to meet their own needs”. In other words
it is improving the quality of life of the present generation without excessive use or abuse of
natural resources, so that they can be preserved for the next generation.

The term was first coined in 1972 at the United Nations Conference on Human Environment at
Stockholm. The most important piece of writing on Sustainable development is in the
publication by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in 1987 titled
„Our Common Future”. In 1992 at the Earth summit at Rio-de-Janerio, 170 countries signed
many important documents on sustainable development pledging preservation of environment.

Sustainable development is often referred as the marriage of economy and ecology. i.e. to attain
economic development without compromising the ecological balance. It can be attained by
rigorous policy change, taking action and altering practices. There are three aims of sustainable
development :-

a) Economic- to attain balanced growth

b) Ecological- to preserve the eco system

c) Social-guarantying equal access to resources to all human communities

The objective laid down in the Brundtland report is as follows

 Dividing growth
 Changing the quality of growth
 Meeting essential needs of all in terms of job, food, energy, water and sanitation.
 Ensuring a sustainable population
 Conserving and enhancing the resource base.
 Reorienting technology, building technology that‟s less exploitative
 Managing environment and economics in decision making.

Need for sustainable development:

There are several challenges that need attention in the arena of economic development and
environmental depletion.

Hence the idea of Sustainable development is essential to address the following issues.

 To curb or prevent the environmental degradation

 To ensure a safe human life
 To check the exploitative technology and find alternative sources
 To check the over exploitation and wastage of natural resources
 To regenerate renewable energy resources
The concept of Sustainable development is based on following principles

 Integration of environment and economic decision

 Stewardship or humans as the caretaker of the environment
 Shared responsibility, accountability and decision making
 Prevention and mitigation
 Conservation
 Waste minimization
 Enhancement of productivity, capability, quality of nature and human life
 Rehabilitation and reclamation
 Scientific and technological innovations

Components of sustainable development:

While discussing the components of sustainable development different criteria have been used
depending on the context and the levels of decision making. The components are broadly
divided into three elements namely social, economic and environmental.

a) Social components-
• Workers health and safety
• Impact on local communities, quality of life
• Benefits to disadvantaged groups

b) Economic components:
• Creation for new markets and opportunities for sale growth
• Cost reduction through efficiency and improvements and reduced energy and raw
material inputs
• Creation of additional value

c) Environmental components:
• Reduce waste, effluent generation, emission into environment
• Reduce impact on human health
• Use of renewable raw material
• Elimination of toxic substances

Brundtland Report
Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report in recognition of former
Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland's role as Chair of the World Commission on
Environment and Development (WCED), was published in 1987 by the United Nations through
the Oxford University Press.

Its targets were multilateralism and interdependence of nations in the search for a sustainable
development path. The report sought to recapture the spirit of the Stockholm Conference which
had introduced environmental concerns to the formal political development sphere. Our
Common Future placed environmental issues firmly on the political agenda; it aimed to discuss
the environment and development as one single issue.

The document was the culmination of a “900-day” international-exercise which catalogued,

analysed, and synthesised: written submissions and expert testimony from “senior government
representatives, scientists and experts, research institutes, industrialists, representatives of non-
governmental organizations, and the general public” held at public hearings throughout the
world.

Content

The Brundtland Commission's mandate was to:

1. “ re-examine the critical issues of environment and development and to formulate

innovative, concrete, and realistic action proposals to deal with them;

2. strengthen international cooperation on environment and development and to assess

and propose new forms of cooperation that can break out of existing patterns and
influence policies and events in the direction of needed change; and

3. raise the level of understanding and commitment to action on the part of individuals,
voluntary organizations, businesses, institutes, and governments” (1987: 347). “The
Commission focused its attention in the areas of population, food security, the loss of
species and genetic resources, energy, industry, and human settlements - realizing that
all of these are connected and cannot be treated in isolation one from another”

The Brundtland Commission Report recognised that human resource development in the form
of poverty reduction, gender equity, and wealth redistribution was crucial to formulating
strategies for environmental conservation, and it also recognised that environmental-limits to
economic growth in industrialised and industrialising societies existed. The Brundtland Report
claimed that poverty reduces sustainability and accelerates environmental pressures – creating
a need for the balancing between economy and ecology.[2]

The publication of Our Common Future and the work of the World Commission on
Environment and Development laid the groundwork for the convening of the 1992 Earth
Summitand the adoption of Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration and to the establishment of
the Commission on Sustainable Development.

An oft-quoted definition of sustainable development is defined in the report as:

"development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs."

In addition, key contributions of Our Common Future to the concept of sustainable

development include the recognition that the many crises facing the planet are interlocking
crises that are elements of a single crisis of the whole and of the vital need for the active
participation of all sectors of society in consultation and decisions relating to sustainable
development.
Sustainable development goals
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the United Nations General Assembly's current
harmonized set of seventeen future international development targets. The Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs) are a collection of 17 global goals set by the United Nations
General Assembly in 2015 for the year 2030. The SDGs are part of Resolution 70/1 of the United
Nations General Assembly, the 2030 Agenda.

The Official Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted on 25 September 2015 has 92
paragraphs, with the main paragraph (51) outlining the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and
its associated 169 targets. This included the following seventeen goals:[108]

1. Poverty – End poverty in all its forms everywhere[109]

2. Food – End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and
promote sustainable agriculture[110]

3. Health – Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages[111]

4. Education – Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong
learning opportunities for all[112]

5. Women – Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls[113]

6. Water – Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for
all[114]

7. Energy – Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all[115]

8. Economy – Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and
productive employment and decent work for all[116]

9. Infrastructure – Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable

industrialization and foster innovation[117]

10. Inequality – Reduce inequality within and among countries[118]

11. Habitation – Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and
sustainable[119]

12. Consumption – Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns[120]

13. Climate – Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts, ensuring that
both mitigation and adaptation strategies are in placed[121]

14. Marine-ecosystems – Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and
marine resources for sustainable development[122]
 15. Ecosystems – Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems,
sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land
degradation and halt biodiversity loss[123]

16. Institutions – Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development,
provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions
at all levels[124]

17. Sustainability – Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global
partnership for sustainable development[125]

As of August 2015, there were 169 proposed targets for these goals and 304 proposed indicators
to show compliance.[126]

The Sustainable Development Goals replace the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),
which expired at the end of 2015. The MDGs were established in 2000 following the Millennium
Summit of the United Nations. Adopted by the 189 United Nations member states at the time
and more than twenty international organizations, these goals were advanced to help achieve
the following sustainable development standards by 2015.

1. To eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

2. To achieve universal primary education

3. To promote gender equality and empower women

 4. To reduce child mortality

5. To improve maternal health

6. To combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases

7. To ensure environmental sustainability (one of the targets in this goal focuses on

increasing sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation)

8. To develop a global partnership for development

Ethics of sustainability
Reason for developing an ethics of sustainability
In short, the world faces numerous political, economic, and social challenges that threaten to
undermine the welfare of people all over the world. Sustainability provides just the type of
approach needed to address these challenges and the ethics of sustainability gives sustainability
legitimacy as a framework. The ethics of sustainability provides a clear sense of the principles
that make sustainability more than just a simple problem-solving system, but make it an idea
that is grounded in commonly understood ethical principles. In short, the ethics of sustainability
provide the moral authority behind sustainability as a fair and equitable approach to making the
world a better place.

Ethics
Ethics is moral responsibility. It is concerned with how we should live, how we should treat
other people and the world around us, in short, how we should act in a moral and responsible
manner. Most opinions or appeals to act in a certain way that include an ‘ought’ or ‘should’ are
normative ethical claims. These normative views and beliefs attempt to prescribe behaviour; for
example, ‘Wilderness areas ought to be protected’, ‘Heritage buildings should be preserved’,
‘Buildings should be designed to have less reliance on non-renewable fossil fuels’, and ‘Carbon
dioxide emissions should be diminished’. Clearly the entreaties to embrace notions of
sustainability and a sustainable architecture have ethical dimensions, but how is the architect to
respond? Typical professional moral behaviour is expressed in terms of guidelines, rules,
standards and codes. As Tom Spector observes, ‘the nature of building codes reinforces the idea
that professional moral obligations exist within a network of well-defined relationships,
expectations, and activities’ (Spector 2001: 130).

We can begin to tackle this question by realizing that our programme to understand (if only
partly) the dimensions of the concept of a sustainable architecture is integrally linked to the
belief systems that generate the notion itself. Taking this as a starting point, we can confront the
questions about the ethical or moral bases of our decision-making. We shall present in barest
outline reasons and motives that can explain good and wrong decisions.

This is tackled in two ways.

1. Why? - The first looks at why decisions are made according to certain ethical precepts,
focusing on the question ‘Just who or what could (or should) be taken into consideration
 as a stakeholder in responsible decision-making?’ This investigation raises issues that
are at the forefront when making ethical judgements – the meaning and use of the term
value, the rights of humans (or other members of a moral class who are held to have
rights), the duties we might have to respect such rights, and understanding the
consequences of actions.
2. How? - The second looks at how decisions are made and focuses on the spectrum of two
broad approaches we might invoke to understand ethical processes in action –
environmental ethics, in particular the way in which we position humans and other
stakeholders in sustainability issues, and discursive ethics, as ‘a process of uncoerced
and undistorted communicative interaction between individuals in open discourse’ that
can provide an operational means of informing ethical behaviour (O’Hara 1996).

Questions about value

Since most attempts at ethical reasoning develop from a consideration of the notion of value,
and questions of value are central to the discussion of sustainability. But what do we mean when
we talk about something or some state of affairs as being valuable? What is value? How does
value arise? Philosophers, economists and of course environmentalists are endlessly discussing
(and hotly disputing) these sorts of questions. They are crucial in understanding the debates and
predicaments associated with making sustainable architecture.

If we start by accepting that humans have a right to life and freedom that may not be infringed,
then these are of central value. Aristotle (fourth century BC) in the first major treatise on ethics
in Western philosophy attributes to happiness, meaning human good, the greatest human value
and its pursuit as the self-evident goal for moral decision-making. Moral behaviour for him
turns out to be ‘an activity of the soul in conformity with excellence or virtue’.

More recently, the moral philosopher Kurt Baier in his investigation of What is Value? An
Analysis of the Concept draws attention to the difference between ‘the value possessed by things’
and the ‘values held by people or societies’. He sees that: “The former is an evaluative property
whose possession and magnitude can be ascertained in appraisals. The latter are dispositions to
behave in certain ways which can be ascertained by observation”.

The value is contingent upon some factor of utility, that is, the value is instrumental. Non
instrumental or intrinsic value is always relegated to a secondary role of consideration. Many
environmental ethicists now totally disagree with such assertions and believe that landscapes,
other organisms, and ecosystems may in some way have an intrinsic value that is just as
important (or perhaps more important) than other values.

This distinction is of particular importance to our understanding of sustainability ethics, where

questions about the value of the natural versus the constructed worlds are central to decision-
making.

There is a need to nurture the intrinsic values that exist both in each person and in our external
worlds. But if something – a person, an animal, a landscape – has value (instrumental or
intrinsic), does it also have rights? If so, whether or not such rights should be taken into account
in making responsible decisions is a key consideration in thinking about sustainability.
The moral class
A key set of issues in dealing with the ethical dimensions of sustainability are those that take in
the question ‘who is due moral consideration?’, or put another way related more directly to the
question of a sustainable architecture – ‘who (or what) are the members of the moral class who
should be regarded as stakeholders in our design decisions?’

‘What kind of person should I be?’, ‘what sort of rules should I follow’: what should guide our
conduct towards each other, our behaviour towards others and, at the same time, the others’
behaviour towards us?

In this tradition aspects of sustainability such as resource usage, pollution, species extinction
and landscape degradation are addressed only to the extent that they impinge on the well-being
or assets of ourselves or other humans. If this is the limit of our concern, how can a notion of
sustainability that also incorporates extending the concept of moral standing to future
generations of humans be justified?

The totally anthropocentric view of moral considerability that persisted for about 2500 years has
been challenged in the last twenty-five years or so.

Environmental ethics considers a range of possible expansions and additions of what may be
given moral standing, to include things other than human beings.7 A systematic description of
candidates for moral consideration are summarized in Table 3.1. But on what principles might
we frame our actions and decisions towards this possible range of stakeholders? The ethical
theories based on the notions of rights and duty provides an insight to this question.
Rights and duties
We are most familiar with the concept of human rights, reserved in common parlance for the
political notions of

 equality before the law;

 protection against arbitrary arrest; the right to a fair trial; f
 reedom of thought, conscience, and religion; freedom of opinion and expression and
 freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

However, an appeal to respecting a wider notion of human rights may be seen as a basis for
ethical decision-making. Certainly at both the international and domestic political level it is
often put forward as the reason for action. Respecting human rights is closely associated with
issues of sustainability: the right to peace, the right to a healthy and balanced environment.

We can take as an example ‘the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being’
as expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If you think that I have a right to an
adequate standard of living, then you are accepting that you have a duty to ensure this happens,
or at least not to contribute to anything that might infringe that right.

In a similar way human rights expressed in terms of needs, wants and interests that provide the
basis of the standards and codes that guide the provision of buildings imply that we have a duty
to respect these rights.

This golden rule for moral behaviour is expressed in a general way as: if you don’t want someone
else to act in a certain way, then you shouldn’t act in that way yourself.

The rights/duty-based approach to ethics provides principles that carry weight out of proportion
to the value of the consequences, that is, the approach tends to be absolute and cannot be
abandoned, no matter what the circumstances. Ethical behaviour follows from respecting rights
or fulfilling duties, rather than being driven by concern about the consequences of one’s actions.
However, another way to consider responsible decision-making is to focus on the consequences
of one’s actions.

The consequentialist approach

Consequentialist approaches to ethics are commonly followed in national policymaking and in
personal decision-making. Consequentialist approaches contrast with the rights/duty-based
approaches, because they are concerned with the consequences of actions rather than with the
duties of the person acting. This approach is fundamentally linked to the concern of
sustainability with considering the future consequences of present decisions.

Consequentialists hold that ethically correct behaviour is about producing the best
consequences. Here, the best consequences are achieved by creating the greatest amount of
happiness.

First, happiness, desires, or preferences are difficult to add up in order to assess the greatest
amounts of them. Second, since utilitarians recognize no absolute rules (such as a right or a
duty), it is not difficult to imagine a decision that might produce the greatest overall happiness
but may be associated with a less than desirable circumstance, such as moving a family from
their home to build a freeway or constructing a large building that deprives a smaller neighbour
of solar access. Such examples illustrate how controversial utilitarianism can be in some
situations.

Intergenerational equity
A problem for all approaches to sustainability ethics concerns the issue of intergenerational
equity inherent in almost every definition of sustainable development and sustainable design.
The needs and wants of future generation change and its difficult to convey and justify it. For eg.
AC in solar passive buildings. Buildings originally designed in the 1970s to operate on passive
solar principles without air conditioning now have air conditioning installed, not because they
didn’t operate effectively, but because the preferences of the occupants have changed.

These approaches to ethics raise issues of interest and concern, and while putting our decision-
making into a broad context they do not explicitly address how in practice we might tackle
making sustainable architecture. The problem is that most of these ethical traditions developed
when philosophers worried mainly about how human beings related to each other, rather than
issues of the environment and issues of sustainability, as we are familiar with them today. To
help position such issues in our decision-making we need to turn to the relatively recent branch
of philosophy, known as environmental ethics, that attempts to frame the moral relations
between human beings and their natural environment.

Environmental ethics
Environmental ethics attempts to explain how human behaviour toward the natural world can
and/or should be governed by moral norms.

The ‘new sciences’ recognize humans not as isolated, separate objects but rather as having
interconnected relationships with eachother and constantly changing relationships with
everything around them – part of the flow of energy, the web of life.

In analysing the environmental movement of the time he identified two key strands; one he
termed shallow and the other deep (see Naess 1989). The shallow movement was primarily
concerned with human welfare and how issues such as the exhaustion of natural resources may
affect this welfare. In contrast, the deep environmental movement was concerned with
fundamental philosophical questions about the ways in which humans relate to their
environment. In particular, deep ecology incorporated insights from modern physics and
ecology into human understanding of the natural world. From this perspective, the first priority
in analysing environmental issues must be in transforming one’s fundamental way of looking at
the world, to develop what Naess calls a more ‘holistic’ outlook.

To link sustainability to the moral class in operational terms we shall adopt Sylvan and
Bennett’s (1994) three broad categories of shallow, intermediate and deep views of
environmental ethics, locating the intermediate position between Naess’s labels of shallow and
deep.
Shallow environmentalism and the precautionary principle
Shallow Environmentalism is anthropocentric. The 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and
Development fits within this anthropocentric view and is framed essentially in terms of long-
term resource management for the benefit of humans. Its Principle 1 states that: ‘Human beings
are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and
productive life in harmony with nature.’ Principle 4 follows with: ‘In order to achieve sustainable
development environmental protection shall constitute an integral part of the development
process.’ This rather contradictory combination of sustainability and development is regarded
by Bengs as an oxymoron.

Sustainability indicates caretaking and maintenance, the repetition of certain procedures. In this
respect sustainability implies a circular notion of time. Development on the other hand is in our
culture connected to a continuous accumulation of capital, material, services, knowledge and
anything that is commodified. Accordingly, development implies a linear notion of time. Is it
possible to integrate those two comprehensions of time into one concept? Can a circle be a
straight line? . . . (Bengs 1993: 21–2)

Intermediate environmentalism
Intermediate positions can be distinguished as rejecting the notion that humans and human
projects are the sole items of value; however serious human concerns always come first [have
greater value]. These positions acknowledge the value-in-their-own-right of some at least of
animals, ecosystems, forests, and other parts of the environment as a whole in addition to their
value for human purposes. (Sylvan and Bennett 1994: 63)

Much of the environmental conservation movement takes at least an intermediate position: we

should protect wilderness, whales and birds both for our own good and for their own sakes.

Humans as decision makers and environment as a concern.

Deep environmentalism
In ‘deep positions’ humanity is pushed firmly back into the status of one amongst many
components of the environment.

Deep positions are characterised by the rejection of the notion that humans and human projects
are the sole items of value, and further by the rejection of the notion that humans and human
projects are always more valuable than all other things in the world. (Sylvan and Bennett 1994:
63)

In deep positions, humans are not held to have a privileged status in the environment. Both the
‘Sole Value Assumption’ and the ‘Greater Value Assumption’ are rejected (Sylvan and Bennett
1994: 90).

It follows that humans have no more right to occupy a site with their building than any other
potential uses of the site that are incompatible with this human use. Humans are placed in the
same position as a lion or tiger that might dominate their site because of their physical and
mental capabilities but have no moral right to that dominating position. Moreover, the unique
ability of humans to recognize that they are dominating means that they have an ethical
responsibility to allow other species space to live; one assumes that lions never claim to see
things from an antelope’s point of view.

Another way of framing a deep approach is to regard not individuals butspecies, populations
and ecological systems as subjects of concern. In this framing of ecological holism, it is the
biosphere as a whole and the major ecosystems that constitute the biosphere (rainforest systems
and wetlands systems, for example) that should always be the centre of our concerns.

James Lovelock uses the ancient Greek word ‘Gaia’ for the Earth as a single living entity ‘in
which the Earth’s living matter, air, oceans, and land surface form a complex system which can
be seen as a single organism and which has the capacity to keep our planet a fit place for life’
(Lovelock 1987: x). What happens to individuals, or even species, is unimportant relative to the
health of these major systems as a whole.

Insofar as a healthy biotic community is considered to be one that has the biological capacity for
self-renewal and its degeneration is the loss of this capacity, we are left with several unresolved
issues. First, how do we view the impact on individuals within a system that may be harmed by
our actions even though the system as a whole continues? And second, since all biotic systems
undergo gradual evolution, how can we define health at a point in time? Climate change, for
example, may result in some systems degenerating while others are enhanced.

‘Taking into account’ does not necessarily imply equal weighting on the significance of the
impact on different individuals or subsystems. If we do give inter-species rights the same
importance as intra-species (human) rights, then it seems to follow that ecological development
should be a minimal intervention to allow humans to survive at about the same quality of living
as other species.

Even this brief summary is sufficient to indicate that deep environmentalism offers a very
different way of analysing environmental issues, and thus a different approach to environmental
ethics, than the more traditional approaches previously outlined. But while environmental
ethics gives us an insight intopossible moral relationships between humans and the non-human
world, it says nothing about procedures that might in a practical way inform real-world
responsible decision-making.

Discourse ethics
Although we may not be able to agree on the theoretical aspects of moral principles, designing
for sustainability in the real world requires that human stakeholders reach some consensus on
the moral aspects of practical issues. Discourse ethics, which owes its foundations to Jürgen
Habermas (1990), offers a process to tackle this problem. As Habermas explains, the key to
discourse ethics is the communication that takes place between the participants in the process.

Discourses take place in particular social contexts and are subject to the limitations of time and
space. Their participants are not Kant’s intelligible characters but real human beings driven by
motives in addition to the one permitted motive of the search for truth. (Habermas 1990: 92)

The ethical quality of discourse ethics stems from the mutual recognition and acceptance of the
others who participate in the process. Discourse ethics is able to account for the full complexity
of real-world decision-making situations because the reasoned arguments that participants
bring to the table are inseparable from the social, cultural, economic and knowledge bases that
informs their contributions. Decisions made as a result of structured discursive reasoning are in
every way as rational as socio-technologically based instrumental reasoning. Because the aim of
the discourse is to ensure that all suppositions are transparent, differing views may be projected;
a utilitarianist’s contribution on social and public good or a deep environmetalist’s view on
intrinsic value. Sabine O’Hara explains how discourse ethics may contribute to sustainability:

1) Discursive ethics adds a contextual dimension to the universal principle of a morality based
on human reason. This dimension makes connections between human–human and human–
environmental systems implicitand thus questions assumptions of isolated, self-interest
motivated agency.

2) Discursive ethics adds a communal dimension to the expression of human reason which
cannot be expressed in isolation . . . Socio-ecological complexities of sustainability cannot be
adequately addressed in disciplinary isolation but rather require broad-based interdisciplinary
discourse.

3) Discursive ethics cannot be conceived as a purely theoretical thought exercise and therefore
adds a practical dimension to moral decision making which links private and public spheres.
(O’Hara 1998)

Imagine three people holding shallow, intermediate and deep environmentalist positions
meeting to discuss a proposed new building in a sensitive area. A successful discourse about the
issue will depend on two things: the individual’s inalienable right to say yes or no to the others’
validity claims, and of them overcoming their egocentric viewpoint. In other words, each
participant must respect the rights and dignity of the others. What we are likely to find in the
discourse is that after hearing the different views, discussion will quickly focus on the impacts of
alternatives, including the impacts of not building. Some options are likely to be rejected by all
three people, narrowing the field. Others may be found not to have a credible argument that can
be constructed in their support. What is left are proposals that while they may not be favoured
by all three people, are the ‘least disfavoured’ by their non-supporters. This does not necessarily
solve the problem, but through such discourse possibilities emerge that none of the participants
originally entertained. In this instance our three participants could be advocates for the full
range of entities due moral consideration, for example, the deep environmentalist could talk for
the trees, and each in their way may speak for future generations, but none of them could truly
be said to represent all entities. Participants may in a real sense represent a human constituency
by passing on their views or even casing votes on their behalf, but they cannot in the same way
represent nature.

Conclusion
A distinctive aspect of sustainability is the attempt to integrate a diverse set of ethical principles
and goals in both theory and practice. Sustainability is not simply a patchwork of disparate
values but an integrated system in which the parts work together to reinforce each other. In the
case of potential conflicts between, for example, environmental and social principles, an ethic of
sustainability should not simply choose one or the other but rather should attempt to maximize
both values to the extent possible. This may require considering a wider range of options than
usual, including some that might not normally seem desirable or feasible. It may require
engaging in dialogue and reaching compromises with individuals or groups that are not one’s
usual conversation partners.

Implementing the values of sustainability might even demand considerable sacrifice of other
interests, both private and collective. In this delicate and difficult task, established traditions of
ethical thinking offer invaluable resources and insight. They can help to identify the values at
stake and clarify the knowledge and assumptions that undergird and justify these values. On a
practical level, ethics provides tools that can help people seeking sustainability to adjudicate
conflicts, set priorities, and seek consensus or compromise.

Visions of Sustainability
Evolving Visions
The landmark 1972 United Nations (UN) Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm
resulted in a declaration that likely represents the first comprehensive statement on
sustainability—without actually using the term. It focused on the foundational role of
environmental quality in achieving a good life. Beginning with a broad conceptualization of the
environment and peoples’ relationship to it, the declaration states “[m]an is both creature and
moulder of his environment, which gives him physical sustenance and affords him the
opportunity for intellectual, moral, social, and spiritual growth.” The declaration goes on to
discuss the importance of “collaborating” with nature when working to promote equity, advance
economic and social development, and improve quality of life for present and future
generations. The World Conservation Strategy, commissioned by the UN Environment
Programme, followed in 1980 and gave currency to the term sustainable development by
stressing the interdependence of conservation and development. Emphasizing the primacy of
Earth’s living support systems for human survival and flourishing, it identified priority
conservation issues and strategies for achieving these aims.
Visions, scenarios and future pathways towards sustainable development
People across the world have a range of views or “visions” of what kind of world they would like
to see for themselves, their children and grandchildren in the future. The Rio+20 Conference of
2012 (UNCSD) agreed on key elements of a common vision for sustainable development. The
OWG on SDGs further explores international consensus. Further, there are different preferences
for alternative future pathways towards achievement of the vision. Scenarios are plausible and
internally consistent pictures of the future. They are useful tools - often making use of
quantitative models - to systematically explore the feasibility of visions and proposed future
pathways towards their achievement. They provide information on the means of
implementation that are needed and can be useful in monitoring progress.